When you connect two car batteries to each other, the one with the lower charge will take from the stronger charge to eventually equalize. The US was the massively stronger battery, and with the allowance of China into the WTO, we connected an extraordinarily weak battery that would serve to both increase the overall charge of both batteries, but while depleting the strength of the US battery to help China's grow more equal.
The problem here was that the basis for the US allowing this connection with China was only for US corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy. Because without the push from Wall Street, those few administrative elites that mistakenly expected the CCP to adopt western style democracy would have never gained enough support to make that connection.
The US economic power was a product of its system of governance and its people that leveraged the system... the idea that is the basis for its existence... the right to pursue self-interest. China could never become what it is today without looting that battery power... it never had the system that inspired or allowed enough individual creative freedom, enterprise and entrepreneurialism. Apple spending $500 billion per year to train China to become a tech industry competitor works well for China, but what happens when Apple stops doing that?
The CCP is paranoid of the West. They loot from it not to become a partner, but to insulate themselves from the threat of the West. That includes continued authoritarian policies to prevent Chinese people from aligning with the West, and thus also preventing the Chinese people from aligning with the required ethos of creativity that drives industrial dominance.
It is unlikely that China will continue to hold their position growing to dominate the world economy as the US pulls back and disconnects the battery.
If both the West and China are autocratic at the same time, I would think that the advantage would be China’s because of their success despite being authoritarian, maybe even a bit totalitarian, while the West is destroying the single most important advantage it still(?) has, which is freedom of speech and inquiry.
This is a great essay, but I find it disconcerting that you, of all people, can write about China at this depth while skirting the fact that it is, at its core, a communist and authoritarian state. Your career has been defined by sounding the alarm on authoritarian threats in the West; surely the sheer size of that issue, insofar as it so obviously applies to China, deserves acknowledgment here.
Given Stephen Kotkin’s prominence — and the broad political spectrum of intellectual consensus his China doctrine commands — it feels strange for a political scientist with your leanings to leave that perspective unaddressed. I would also be very interested to hear your take on the Clinton doctrine that justified opening trade with China, now that we’ve had decades to test its premises against reality.
And before the pile-on begins (or the silent treatment, which i suppose is worse): yes, I’m well aware of the perspectives of Lawrence Summers and Jeffrey Sachs, and many others, and I sense you may be writing from somewhere in that neighborhood. But that’s exactly why I’m pressing the point. What I’m hoping is that you — and perhaps some of your readers who are serious thinkers and subject experts — can help this plebian sort out how to think about the tension between those doctrines and perspectives, and how you yourself categorize the authoritarian threat that China represents.
I worry that U.S.–China alignment could well prove to be the most consequential and challenging geopolitical issue of our time — which is really saying something. Your background and reputation put you in a position where your voice could be especially influential and important on this front.
Did you read this piece? How is Mounk skirting around Chinas authoritarianism? Every other sentence tells the reader that china is pervasively authoritarian….
Yascha’s two lenses on China — strength and weakness intertwined — reminded me of a few historical lessons: powers that looked invincible, until the very structure of their strength became their downfall.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, and here in the U.S. I sometimes notice something unexpected: when I talk to Chinese people, after the polite “how are you,” there’s an almost instant familiarity — as if we came from the same country.
The parallels are striking. The USSR in the 1940s transformed from an agrarian society into an industrial power through authoritarian planning. For decades, the “five-year plans” worked — until they no longer did, and the Soviet state collapsed under its own contradictions.
China’s leaders studied that collapse carefully. They allowed private property and foreign investment before it came, buying resilience and prolonging their run. And yet the deeper question remains: can autocratic rule sustain itself indefinitely?
The very strengths that powered China’s remarkable rise — centralization, discipline, long-horizon planning — also create fragility. These are the cracks. They remind me less of the USSR of the 1940s and more of the 1980s: a surface of strength concealing brittleness underneath.
Whether this hybrid system buys time or sets up a more spectacular failure is unclear. But history suggests that once cracks appear, they don’t heal. They spread.
I would take exception to the idea that Myanmar and China are staunch allies. The junta and the CPC have had a very rocky relationship - the Aung San Suu Kyi government’s close relationship with China (they were fully signed onto the BRI) was one of the stated reasons *for* the coup.
China has close ties to many separatist groups in the Shan state, most notably the Wa state. Indeed, the case could be made that China has unnecessarily prolonged the civil war by not being supportive *enough* of the junta.
By contrast, China enjoys much closer relations with Thailand, Malaysia, and even Singapore.
It is an understandable slip, as there is an - oddly unquestioned - dominant western media narrative that China and the Junta are autocratic brothers oppressing arm in arms. If I had to pontificate why, it is likely that anti-junta activists in the west view it as strategically beneficial to place their struggle in the context of a broader anti-China one.
"....it is likely that anti-junta activists in the west view it as strategically beneficial to place their struggle in the context of a broader anti-China one."
I am somewhat troubled to say that it is a relief to read something about the weaknesses of China. All we ever seem to read here in the US is these incredible tales of strength and pride that seem to be designed to put us to shame
I have always thought there must be some weaknesses, the population decline being the principal one that I’m aware of, and that you mentioned in your essay, for that is a flashing red sign of an unhappy, civilization, and an existential crisis.
It reminds me to a great extent of our view of Japan in the 1980s from the perspective of people like James Fallows who had us all persuaded that we should learn Japanese as they were about to conquer the United States without firing a shot.
As it turned out, they ended up in the fetal position on their island still trying to recover from the debt binge they went on in the 80s to buy the United States golf courses and such and vastly overpay at the hands of kindly Americans who were more than willing t abscond with their money, so we’ll have to see what happens with our Chinese friends (if we have any).
I suspect a reckoning is in store because I see many of the signs I saw with the salarymen who were supposed to conquer us and who now are trying to find themselves at some train station in the north of Japan.
It seems like we always end up winning, doesn’t it?
Many of my MBA courses in the early 90’s were focused on how Japan was eating our lunch in the USA. I have thought of the eventual fall of Japan often as the experts are now claiming how China is superior to the USA. Will history repeat itself?
I think you need to address that "law" and "professor" quality writing is pretty low in China. For example, there is no Chinese Fukuyama. There is no Chinese Bataille, or Foucault, to name the obvious.
Yes he was certainly a genius. But he unleashed, along with others, postmodernism, which has evolved in western society into an incoherent and widely followed worldview. This, along with his musings on "power" which itself has resulted in unhealthy preoccupations in modern society, has led to much of the discontent the west is currently experiencing.
Well, few people have the patience, background, or strength of mind to read Foucault. His bastards though are everywhere. He is the philosophy of modernity and its entrenchment of bio-power, and the strengthening of overwhelming force, which conceals itself. I don't think people are less happy because of him, I think they use him to militia their rage at power, and people have done that since Christ, since Peasant revolutions, since every Luciferian strain has mocked God.
That there is "no Fukuyama, Bataille, or Foucault in China" is a good thing. For Fukuyama, his silly thesis was ultimately shown to be completely wrong, so to recover he had to quickly come out with another book negating the first, and American academia ate it up...because all the other academics were. They couldn't bring themselves to admit he was empty. Bataille...is it his transgressive philosophy or his eroticism we're supposed to engage? No one cared at the time; it took the American university elite to transform him into something to confuse youngsters. And Foucault, darling of the American University Professoriat...meh. History will, and already is, showing him to be an empty vessel.
You're young. You were overexposed to American university bias in education, and may not be aware of it.
Yes, but intellectual bravery and profundity is largely missing entirely from the Chinese academy. Can you name one Chinese intellectual or even Chinese American Intellectual? There are no Chinese variants on how communism is functioning in China today, nothing sophisticated like the Soviets. There's nothing. Even a bad fabrication of a theses like Fukuyama is better than nothing. On Bataille, I think his main focus is economy and transgressions. On Foucault, most professors just pretend to be able to read him. He's incredibly dense and hard to read. Much harder than Marx and that's saying a lot. More like Simmel in "Philosophy of Money"
I suppose so...I live on a campus of a large National University in Wuhan, a 985'er, so it's got a little heft, but no one is sticking their necks out in a manner you'd like. I do find things with beautiful little nuggets hiding between the lines. It's out there if one wants to find it, but I agree that bravery is largely absent. Profundity...I can find it if I'm looking, often in ways more interesting than the Western mode of shaking one's fist at the hierarchy. Americans are always fascinated with fists shaken at authority.
All those guys...and it's always all guys...that are so lionized in Western university discourse, are useful for academics and their charges to marvel over at Friday afternoon cocktail parties and collectivized symposiums paying homage to...not much actually, mostly themselves. It's akin to debating whether or not we live in a computer simulation. It fills space and takes one no place in particular, which fascinates the professorial clerisy. Ascribing hardness and density to any of it is dressing up what's not there.
Yascha, a pity we didn't get more of a chance to chat in Shanghai when I was there. If you're up for it, come onto Sinica and talk about your China impressions! I'd be delighted to host you. I'll be back in China after September 4, and in Shanghai the week of the 22nd; not sure where you are these days, but I'm flexible.
The depopulation will be felt most economically. China is already beyond all known economic modeling, of I remember correctly. You have to have consumers to drive your economic engine. And they will run out of them. It’s essentially a maximal version of the problem the US is going to have with social security - too many at the top drawing and not enough at lower levels contributing. But instead of just one policy, it’s their entire economy. Add the cultural preference for boys and that a male child is responsible for the parents in their own age legally (if you have a boy you have a built in 401k, a girl not so much. And remember you could only have one child for quite some time) and you get a very skewed demographic set
As an American trying to learn more about China, I found this hugely helpful and informative. Will have to reread it closely to better understand the points he is making. Many thanks for this fascinating article!!
Yascha, a tour de force from a "journalist" who has actually visited and interviewed those "on the ground" in an area of "conflict." One wishes that other MSM "reporters" - for they are only that these days, and not journalists - did the same to support their articles, rather than just plugging into Mr. Google for their information and making a few phone calls. The readers comments are also most insightful. In previous article you have supported the notion that to try and understand the present political problems facing the World, one can get a very good guide from the study of history. Clinton allowing the fox into the hen house when he persuaded the WEF to accept China, was the right path and decision to take.... at that time. Nixon had opened up the acceptance of China by the West and Clinton capped off this initiative. However as other readers have pointed out, the way the Chinese do business is not the way those doyens of Western businessmen expected China to knuckle under and do the same. What Clinton and the West failed to appreciate was that China was still basically Communist, the arch enemy of America from after WW II and we need not go into the "Reds Under The Beds" dogma of of McCarthyism. The American ruling class has tried appeasement under the Dems and strength under the Republicans - Ron Reagan bringing the Cold War to an end with the insistence of frightening the Russian Bear into submission by insisting that the SDI or "Star Wars" to the MSM was what America was able to do - when in fact the technology was just not there. But China is China and no one needs to be reminded that they "play the long game." Zhou Enlai's famous comment about the French Revolution being "too early to say" is often misattributed; he was actually referring to the events of 1968 in France, not the revolution of 1789. This misunderstanding has persisted over time, but it fits a stereotype of Chinese leaders being long-term thinkers. One might say that - as your article points out - that China has some serious problems and these will come more and more to light as they become richer and richer as a nation. One could say that Trump really doesn't care what happens in the Ukraine, it is the "taming of China" on which he and his administration are focusing. They are Communist which Americans abhor. America could just say "we are out of here" to Europe. "You deal with Putin and the threat of Russia without American assistance." The EU are deathly scared of this withdrawal of the "benign hegemony" of America. Trump is Trump. Putin is Putin, and the World waits for the final show down which most likely as Diane Francis says will be a slow burn towards a Munich appeasement by the tyrant Putin. That will release Trump to focus America's financial strength on the threat of China that really threatens America's dominance. We shall see. But don't let MSM fool you Americans into thinking that Trump has been a "failure" in so far as on his inauguration, he didn't immediately force Putin to sign a Peace Treaty. Trump's utterances should never be taken literally, but they should be taken seriously.
I enjoyed the article. So take the criticism in context of how I like it overall.
While the article is seemingly aimed at about anyone interested in china, the end seems focussed to Americans. The USA does not represent democracy. It is a specific democracy, and the largest and most powerful. And the nature of that democracy is t the same as 50 years ago. We are always stepping in a different river. That is why I find critiquing (or admiring) certain conditions worthy than the overall final comparison between A and B.
If China's fertility rate is truly falling to 1.0, it seems like they may be getting back to the one-child policy without needing a government mandate?
Most social science research these days concludes that China would have essentially ended up with the one-child policy through natural trends of economic growth and birth rate declines even in the absence of a supporting policy regime. Heartbreaking.
Audit Strike: Why Yascha Mounk Misvalues Chinese Culture
Introduction
In his recent essay on China, Yascha Mounk concludes with what he imagines to be a clinching observation: that China’s cultural pull is “astonishingly weak.” This final paragraph matters because it underpins his entire “China Peak” narrative — the claim that the country is brittle, stagnant, and destined to falter. Yet the conclusion is unsound. To misdescribe Chinese cultural power in 2025 is not a minor footnote; it is an accounting fault on the largest line item of the balance sheet. In financial terms, it is as if an auditor has written down the company’s greatest asset to zero. Once that error is exposed, confidence in the whole report collapses.
This essay audits Mounk’s claim. It demonstrates that Chinese cultural presence is not weak but surging across multiple modalities: platforms, consumer goods, food and lifestyle, storytelling, and everyday rituals. It argues that the trend lines are overwhelmingly in China’s favour. If culture is treated as infrastructure and influence, rather than celebrity recognition, then the notion of cultural weakness is untenable. And once this misvaluation is corrected, the rest of the “China Peak” thesis loses credibility.
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1. Platforms as Cultural Infrastructure
Mounk treats culture as the ability to name celebrities. But culture today is not reducible to recognition; it is the infrastructure through which people organise their daily lives. By this measure, China already possesses the most powerful cultural export of the 21st century: TikTok. Together with its domestic twin Douyin, TikTok reaches an estimated 2.3 billion monthly users, outstripping Instagram’s Reels (Soax 2025). The platform has not simply captured attention, it has restructured it. The grammar of youth culture worldwide is now Chinese: swipe, loop, remix, repeat.
To dismiss this on the grounds that many videos are not in Mandarin is to miss the point. Saying TikTok is not cultural because it is not Mandarin-language is like saying Coca-Cola was never cultural because it was just sugared water. The power lies in owning the format that organises desire.
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2. From Format to Narrative
Even if one accepted the “format but not content” objection, it no longer holds true. Increasingly the content itself is Chinese. Mandarin-language micro-dramas with subtitles have gone viral across the West. The app ReelShort, which localises Chinese mini-dramas, has out-downloaded Netflix in the United States (Fortune 2025). Series like Reborn at 18: The Great-Grandma Takes Charge have amassed billions of views, translated into multiple languages (iChongqing 2025). Another platform, RedNote, has become a hub for millions of global youth consuming Chinese short dramas directly in Mandarin.
This marks a transition from infrastructure hegemony (owning the format) to narrative hegemony (exporting the stories themselves). China is no longer just the architect of attention but also the storyteller shaping imagination.
⸻
3. Consumer Icons as Cultural Symbols
Culture is also encoded in consumer goods. In Africa, Chinese smartphones from Huawei, Xiaomi, and especially Transsion’s Tecno and Itel dominate the market. These devices are not just communication tools; they are the portals through which music, messaging, and finance circulate. In EVs, BYD has already overtaken Tesla in global sales (Bloomberg 2025). Its sleek design language is setting global expectations in exactly the way Apple once did.
In fashion, SHEIN has eclipsed Zara and H&M in valuation, merging fast fashion with algorithmic trend cycles. Temu has so disrupted U.S. retail that Amazon and U.S. policymakers lobbied to curb its de minimis shipping advantage (Financial Times 2025). These brands are not only economic competitors; they are cultural icons. Just as Levi’s and Nike once symbolised American identity, SHEIN and Temu now shape youth aesthetics.
⸻
4. Food and Everyday Rituals
Soft power is not confined to film festivals or high culture. It lives in everyday rituals. Mixue Bingcheng, the Chinese ice cream and tea chain, now has more outlets than McDonald’s worldwide (Global Times 2025). Luckin Coffee and Chagee bubble tea are outpacing Starbucks across Asia. These brands are no longer niche; they are redefining the taste of daily life. If McDonald’s and Starbucks once embodied the cultural peak of America, Mixue and Luckin now serve that function for China.
⸻
5. Storytelling and Symbolic Penetration
Chinese storytelling has also leapt from the domestic to the global stage. Animated blockbusters Ne Zha (2019) and Ne Zha 2 (2024) broke records, surpassing Disney in box office receipts within China and spawning massive merchandise lines. Viral mascots like the Labubu doll have become global memes, their imagery circulating across platforms in much the same way Pokémon once did.
At the elite end, Tang Yi’s short film All the Crows in the World won the Palme d’Or for Best Short at Cannes and the Grand Jury Award at SXSW (Wikipedia 2024). Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows (2024) has screened internationally to acclaim. These examples prove Chinese culture is penetrating both mass-market and high-art circuits.
⸻
6. Africa as Test Case of Cultural Pull
Africa demonstrates the clearest contrast. In much of the continent, American cultural exports are limited to music, film, and a small elite consumption layer. Chinese cultural infrastructure, by contrast, is embedded in daily life: smartphones, e-commerce platforms, and retail brands. The continent’s youthful demographics mean these patterns will shape the next century. By any realistic measure, China’s cultural presence in Africa is already far stronger than America’s.
⸻
7. The Audit Punchline
If Mounk’s final paragraph is wrong, then his whole essay falters. He has misvalued China’s greatest cultural assets. In the language of finance, this is not a rounding error but a false balance sheet. The result is a distorted “China Peak” thesis. As in an audit, once one finds an inventory fault on the largest line, the entire report must be reconsidered.
⸻
Conclusion: The Trend Is China’s Friend
Chinese cultural presence is not weak, it is expanding: from platforms to products, from food chains to film festivals, from Africa’s smartphones to the viral dramas watched by teenagers in Los Angeles. What Mounk describes as weakness is in fact one of the strongest trend lines in contemporary global culture. And the trend is China’s friend in the end.
⸻
Bibliography
Bloomberg (2025). BYD Tops Tesla in Global EV Sales for Second Year Running. Bloomberg, 12 January.
Financial Times (2025). Temu Forces Amazon and Washington to Act on de minimis Loophole. Financial Times, 5 March.
Fortune (2025). China’s Micro-Dramas Are Conquering the World. Fortune, 5 February.
Global Times (2025). Mixue Surpasses McDonald’s as World’s Largest Franchise. Global Times, 21 July.
iChongqing (2025). From China to the World: Viral Micro-Drama Drives 1 Billion Global Surge. iChongqing, 8 August.
Soax (2025). Top Social Media Platforms by Users. Soax Research, 17 June.
When you connect two car batteries to each other, the one with the lower charge will take from the stronger charge to eventually equalize. The US was the massively stronger battery, and with the allowance of China into the WTO, we connected an extraordinarily weak battery that would serve to both increase the overall charge of both batteries, but while depleting the strength of the US battery to help China's grow more equal.
The problem here was that the basis for the US allowing this connection with China was only for US corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy. Because without the push from Wall Street, those few administrative elites that mistakenly expected the CCP to adopt western style democracy would have never gained enough support to make that connection.
The US economic power was a product of its system of governance and its people that leveraged the system... the idea that is the basis for its existence... the right to pursue self-interest. China could never become what it is today without looting that battery power... it never had the system that inspired or allowed enough individual creative freedom, enterprise and entrepreneurialism. Apple spending $500 billion per year to train China to become a tech industry competitor works well for China, but what happens when Apple stops doing that?
The CCP is paranoid of the West. They loot from it not to become a partner, but to insulate themselves from the threat of the West. That includes continued authoritarian policies to prevent Chinese people from aligning with the West, and thus also preventing the Chinese people from aligning with the required ethos of creativity that drives industrial dominance.
It is unlikely that China will continue to hold their position growing to dominate the world economy as the US pulls back and disconnects the battery.
But will Western nations hold their lead, as they become more autocratic?
If both the West and China are autocratic at the same time, I would think that the advantage would be China’s because of their success despite being authoritarian, maybe even a bit totalitarian, while the West is destroying the single most important advantage it still(?) has, which is freedom of speech and inquiry.
They won’t 🤨
This is a great essay, but I find it disconcerting that you, of all people, can write about China at this depth while skirting the fact that it is, at its core, a communist and authoritarian state. Your career has been defined by sounding the alarm on authoritarian threats in the West; surely the sheer size of that issue, insofar as it so obviously applies to China, deserves acknowledgment here.
Given Stephen Kotkin’s prominence — and the broad political spectrum of intellectual consensus his China doctrine commands — it feels strange for a political scientist with your leanings to leave that perspective unaddressed. I would also be very interested to hear your take on the Clinton doctrine that justified opening trade with China, now that we’ve had decades to test its premises against reality.
And before the pile-on begins (or the silent treatment, which i suppose is worse): yes, I’m well aware of the perspectives of Lawrence Summers and Jeffrey Sachs, and many others, and I sense you may be writing from somewhere in that neighborhood. But that’s exactly why I’m pressing the point. What I’m hoping is that you — and perhaps some of your readers who are serious thinkers and subject experts — can help this plebian sort out how to think about the tension between those doctrines and perspectives, and how you yourself categorize the authoritarian threat that China represents.
I worry that U.S.–China alignment could well prove to be the most consequential and challenging geopolitical issue of our time — which is really saying something. Your background and reputation put you in a position where your voice could be especially influential and important on this front.
Did you read this piece? How is Mounk skirting around Chinas authoritarianism? Every other sentence tells the reader that china is pervasively authoritarian….
Yascha’s two lenses on China — strength and weakness intertwined — reminded me of a few historical lessons: powers that looked invincible, until the very structure of their strength became their downfall.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, and here in the U.S. I sometimes notice something unexpected: when I talk to Chinese people, after the polite “how are you,” there’s an almost instant familiarity — as if we came from the same country.
The parallels are striking. The USSR in the 1940s transformed from an agrarian society into an industrial power through authoritarian planning. For decades, the “five-year plans” worked — until they no longer did, and the Soviet state collapsed under its own contradictions.
China’s leaders studied that collapse carefully. They allowed private property and foreign investment before it came, buying resilience and prolonging their run. And yet the deeper question remains: can autocratic rule sustain itself indefinitely?
The very strengths that powered China’s remarkable rise — centralization, discipline, long-horizon planning — also create fragility. These are the cracks. They remind me less of the USSR of the 1940s and more of the 1980s: a surface of strength concealing brittleness underneath.
Whether this hybrid system buys time or sets up a more spectacular failure is unclear. But history suggests that once cracks appear, they don’t heal. They spread.
I would take exception to the idea that Myanmar and China are staunch allies. The junta and the CPC have had a very rocky relationship - the Aung San Suu Kyi government’s close relationship with China (they were fully signed onto the BRI) was one of the stated reasons *for* the coup.
China has close ties to many separatist groups in the Shan state, most notably the Wa state. Indeed, the case could be made that China has unnecessarily prolonged the civil war by not being supportive *enough* of the junta.
By contrast, China enjoys much closer relations with Thailand, Malaysia, and even Singapore.
It is an understandable slip, as there is an - oddly unquestioned - dominant western media narrative that China and the Junta are autocratic brothers oppressing arm in arms. If I had to pontificate why, it is likely that anti-junta activists in the west view it as strategically beneficial to place their struggle in the context of a broader anti-China one.
"....it is likely that anti-junta activists in the west view it as strategically beneficial to place their struggle in the context of a broader anti-China one."
Bingo.
There are some really excellent novels coming out of China and films. "Farewell my Concubine" is monumental. Yu Hua's "To Live" is epic.
I am somewhat troubled to say that it is a relief to read something about the weaknesses of China. All we ever seem to read here in the US is these incredible tales of strength and pride that seem to be designed to put us to shame
I have always thought there must be some weaknesses, the population decline being the principal one that I’m aware of, and that you mentioned in your essay, for that is a flashing red sign of an unhappy, civilization, and an existential crisis.
It reminds me to a great extent of our view of Japan in the 1980s from the perspective of people like James Fallows who had us all persuaded that we should learn Japanese as they were about to conquer the United States without firing a shot.
As it turned out, they ended up in the fetal position on their island still trying to recover from the debt binge they went on in the 80s to buy the United States golf courses and such and vastly overpay at the hands of kindly Americans who were more than willing t abscond with their money, so we’ll have to see what happens with our Chinese friends (if we have any).
I suspect a reckoning is in store because I see many of the signs I saw with the salarymen who were supposed to conquer us and who now are trying to find themselves at some train station in the north of Japan.
It seems like we always end up winning, doesn’t it?
Many of my MBA courses in the early 90’s were focused on how Japan was eating our lunch in the USA. I have thought of the eventual fall of Japan often as the experts are now claiming how China is superior to the USA. Will history repeat itself?
Seems to be so far 🤨
🫰
So far 🤨
As of today, I think so. It amazes me how we always win, apparently in spite of ourselves.
Is this not a zero-sum narrow view?
No.
?? Who wins? Who loose?
Please refer to the dictionary of your choice
for the definition of the word “tendentious”.
Try to work on that.
I think you need to address that "law" and "professor" quality writing is pretty low in China. For example, there is no Chinese Fukuyama. There is no Chinese Bataille, or Foucault, to name the obvious.
Thank goodness there is no Foucault in China or anywhere else for that matter.
Why is that? I love Foucault, he's a great genius!
Yes he was certainly a genius. But he unleashed, along with others, postmodernism, which has evolved in western society into an incoherent and widely followed worldview. This, along with his musings on "power" which itself has resulted in unhealthy preoccupations in modern society, has led to much of the discontent the west is currently experiencing.
Well, few people have the patience, background, or strength of mind to read Foucault. His bastards though are everywhere. He is the philosophy of modernity and its entrenchment of bio-power, and the strengthening of overwhelming force, which conceals itself. I don't think people are less happy because of him, I think they use him to militia their rage at power, and people have done that since Christ, since Peasant revolutions, since every Luciferian strain has mocked God.
That there is "no Fukuyama, Bataille, or Foucault in China" is a good thing. For Fukuyama, his silly thesis was ultimately shown to be completely wrong, so to recover he had to quickly come out with another book negating the first, and American academia ate it up...because all the other academics were. They couldn't bring themselves to admit he was empty. Bataille...is it his transgressive philosophy or his eroticism we're supposed to engage? No one cared at the time; it took the American university elite to transform him into something to confuse youngsters. And Foucault, darling of the American University Professoriat...meh. History will, and already is, showing him to be an empty vessel.
You're young. You were overexposed to American university bias in education, and may not be aware of it.
Yes, but intellectual bravery and profundity is largely missing entirely from the Chinese academy. Can you name one Chinese intellectual or even Chinese American Intellectual? There are no Chinese variants on how communism is functioning in China today, nothing sophisticated like the Soviets. There's nothing. Even a bad fabrication of a theses like Fukuyama is better than nothing. On Bataille, I think his main focus is economy and transgressions. On Foucault, most professors just pretend to be able to read him. He's incredibly dense and hard to read. Much harder than Marx and that's saying a lot. More like Simmel in "Philosophy of Money"
I suppose so...I live on a campus of a large National University in Wuhan, a 985'er, so it's got a little heft, but no one is sticking their necks out in a manner you'd like. I do find things with beautiful little nuggets hiding between the lines. It's out there if one wants to find it, but I agree that bravery is largely absent. Profundity...I can find it if I'm looking, often in ways more interesting than the Western mode of shaking one's fist at the hierarchy. Americans are always fascinated with fists shaken at authority.
All those guys...and it's always all guys...that are so lionized in Western university discourse, are useful for academics and their charges to marvel over at Friday afternoon cocktail parties and collectivized symposiums paying homage to...not much actually, mostly themselves. It's akin to debating whether or not we live in a computer simulation. It fills space and takes one no place in particular, which fascinates the professorial clerisy. Ascribing hardness and density to any of it is dressing up what's not there.
I think Wuhan is where my mom's family from, her dad went to Nanjing University a long time ago. How did you learn how to speak Chinese so well?
I don't. My Chinese is horrible.
it seems like the Chinese don’t care if visitors speak Chinese or not and its fairly easy to survive with almost no Chinese ability
Yascha, a pity we didn't get more of a chance to chat in Shanghai when I was there. If you're up for it, come onto Sinica and talk about your China impressions! I'd be delighted to host you. I'll be back in China after September 4, and in Shanghai the week of the 22nd; not sure where you are these days, but I'm flexible.
The depopulation will be felt most economically. China is already beyond all known economic modeling, of I remember correctly. You have to have consumers to drive your economic engine. And they will run out of them. It’s essentially a maximal version of the problem the US is going to have with social security - too many at the top drawing and not enough at lower levels contributing. But instead of just one policy, it’s their entire economy. Add the cultural preference for boys and that a male child is responsible for the parents in their own age legally (if you have a boy you have a built in 401k, a girl not so much. And remember you could only have one child for quite some time) and you get a very skewed demographic set
As an American trying to learn more about China, I found this hugely helpful and informative. Will have to reread it closely to better understand the points he is making. Many thanks for this fascinating article!!
Yascha, a tour de force from a "journalist" who has actually visited and interviewed those "on the ground" in an area of "conflict." One wishes that other MSM "reporters" - for they are only that these days, and not journalists - did the same to support their articles, rather than just plugging into Mr. Google for their information and making a few phone calls. The readers comments are also most insightful. In previous article you have supported the notion that to try and understand the present political problems facing the World, one can get a very good guide from the study of history. Clinton allowing the fox into the hen house when he persuaded the WEF to accept China, was the right path and decision to take.... at that time. Nixon had opened up the acceptance of China by the West and Clinton capped off this initiative. However as other readers have pointed out, the way the Chinese do business is not the way those doyens of Western businessmen expected China to knuckle under and do the same. What Clinton and the West failed to appreciate was that China was still basically Communist, the arch enemy of America from after WW II and we need not go into the "Reds Under The Beds" dogma of of McCarthyism. The American ruling class has tried appeasement under the Dems and strength under the Republicans - Ron Reagan bringing the Cold War to an end with the insistence of frightening the Russian Bear into submission by insisting that the SDI or "Star Wars" to the MSM was what America was able to do - when in fact the technology was just not there. But China is China and no one needs to be reminded that they "play the long game." Zhou Enlai's famous comment about the French Revolution being "too early to say" is often misattributed; he was actually referring to the events of 1968 in France, not the revolution of 1789. This misunderstanding has persisted over time, but it fits a stereotype of Chinese leaders being long-term thinkers. One might say that - as your article points out - that China has some serious problems and these will come more and more to light as they become richer and richer as a nation. One could say that Trump really doesn't care what happens in the Ukraine, it is the "taming of China" on which he and his administration are focusing. They are Communist which Americans abhor. America could just say "we are out of here" to Europe. "You deal with Putin and the threat of Russia without American assistance." The EU are deathly scared of this withdrawal of the "benign hegemony" of America. Trump is Trump. Putin is Putin, and the World waits for the final show down which most likely as Diane Francis says will be a slow burn towards a Munich appeasement by the tyrant Putin. That will release Trump to focus America's financial strength on the threat of China that really threatens America's dominance. We shall see. But don't let MSM fool you Americans into thinking that Trump has been a "failure" in so far as on his inauguration, he didn't immediately force Putin to sign a Peace Treaty. Trump's utterances should never be taken literally, but they should be taken seriously.
I enjoyed the article. So take the criticism in context of how I like it overall.
While the article is seemingly aimed at about anyone interested in china, the end seems focussed to Americans. The USA does not represent democracy. It is a specific democracy, and the largest and most powerful. And the nature of that democracy is t the same as 50 years ago. We are always stepping in a different river. That is why I find critiquing (or admiring) certain conditions worthy than the overall final comparison between A and B.
Yes, I should have written economically largest.
India is the largest democracy…
Thank you Yascha! I've been looking forward to your counterpoint to your earlier essay. Very insightful.
If China's fertility rate is truly falling to 1.0, it seems like they may be getting back to the one-child policy without needing a government mandate?
Most social science research these days concludes that China would have essentially ended up with the one-child policy through natural trends of economic growth and birth rate declines even in the absence of a supporting policy regime. Heartbreaking.
"Remarkable rise..?"
Nothing is "remarkable" under Chinese Communism..."remarked upon" is forbidden...a feeling
many UK residents are experiencing...
Audit Strike: Why Yascha Mounk Misvalues Chinese Culture
Introduction
In his recent essay on China, Yascha Mounk concludes with what he imagines to be a clinching observation: that China’s cultural pull is “astonishingly weak.” This final paragraph matters because it underpins his entire “China Peak” narrative — the claim that the country is brittle, stagnant, and destined to falter. Yet the conclusion is unsound. To misdescribe Chinese cultural power in 2025 is not a minor footnote; it is an accounting fault on the largest line item of the balance sheet. In financial terms, it is as if an auditor has written down the company’s greatest asset to zero. Once that error is exposed, confidence in the whole report collapses.
This essay audits Mounk’s claim. It demonstrates that Chinese cultural presence is not weak but surging across multiple modalities: platforms, consumer goods, food and lifestyle, storytelling, and everyday rituals. It argues that the trend lines are overwhelmingly in China’s favour. If culture is treated as infrastructure and influence, rather than celebrity recognition, then the notion of cultural weakness is untenable. And once this misvaluation is corrected, the rest of the “China Peak” thesis loses credibility.
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1. Platforms as Cultural Infrastructure
Mounk treats culture as the ability to name celebrities. But culture today is not reducible to recognition; it is the infrastructure through which people organise their daily lives. By this measure, China already possesses the most powerful cultural export of the 21st century: TikTok. Together with its domestic twin Douyin, TikTok reaches an estimated 2.3 billion monthly users, outstripping Instagram’s Reels (Soax 2025). The platform has not simply captured attention, it has restructured it. The grammar of youth culture worldwide is now Chinese: swipe, loop, remix, repeat.
To dismiss this on the grounds that many videos are not in Mandarin is to miss the point. Saying TikTok is not cultural because it is not Mandarin-language is like saying Coca-Cola was never cultural because it was just sugared water. The power lies in owning the format that organises desire.
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2. From Format to Narrative
Even if one accepted the “format but not content” objection, it no longer holds true. Increasingly the content itself is Chinese. Mandarin-language micro-dramas with subtitles have gone viral across the West. The app ReelShort, which localises Chinese mini-dramas, has out-downloaded Netflix in the United States (Fortune 2025). Series like Reborn at 18: The Great-Grandma Takes Charge have amassed billions of views, translated into multiple languages (iChongqing 2025). Another platform, RedNote, has become a hub for millions of global youth consuming Chinese short dramas directly in Mandarin.
This marks a transition from infrastructure hegemony (owning the format) to narrative hegemony (exporting the stories themselves). China is no longer just the architect of attention but also the storyteller shaping imagination.
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3. Consumer Icons as Cultural Symbols
Culture is also encoded in consumer goods. In Africa, Chinese smartphones from Huawei, Xiaomi, and especially Transsion’s Tecno and Itel dominate the market. These devices are not just communication tools; they are the portals through which music, messaging, and finance circulate. In EVs, BYD has already overtaken Tesla in global sales (Bloomberg 2025). Its sleek design language is setting global expectations in exactly the way Apple once did.
In fashion, SHEIN has eclipsed Zara and H&M in valuation, merging fast fashion with algorithmic trend cycles. Temu has so disrupted U.S. retail that Amazon and U.S. policymakers lobbied to curb its de minimis shipping advantage (Financial Times 2025). These brands are not only economic competitors; they are cultural icons. Just as Levi’s and Nike once symbolised American identity, SHEIN and Temu now shape youth aesthetics.
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4. Food and Everyday Rituals
Soft power is not confined to film festivals or high culture. It lives in everyday rituals. Mixue Bingcheng, the Chinese ice cream and tea chain, now has more outlets than McDonald’s worldwide (Global Times 2025). Luckin Coffee and Chagee bubble tea are outpacing Starbucks across Asia. These brands are no longer niche; they are redefining the taste of daily life. If McDonald’s and Starbucks once embodied the cultural peak of America, Mixue and Luckin now serve that function for China.
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5. Storytelling and Symbolic Penetration
Chinese storytelling has also leapt from the domestic to the global stage. Animated blockbusters Ne Zha (2019) and Ne Zha 2 (2024) broke records, surpassing Disney in box office receipts within China and spawning massive merchandise lines. Viral mascots like the Labubu doll have become global memes, their imagery circulating across platforms in much the same way Pokémon once did.
At the elite end, Tang Yi’s short film All the Crows in the World won the Palme d’Or for Best Short at Cannes and the Grand Jury Award at SXSW (Wikipedia 2024). Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows (2024) has screened internationally to acclaim. These examples prove Chinese culture is penetrating both mass-market and high-art circuits.
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6. Africa as Test Case of Cultural Pull
Africa demonstrates the clearest contrast. In much of the continent, American cultural exports are limited to music, film, and a small elite consumption layer. Chinese cultural infrastructure, by contrast, is embedded in daily life: smartphones, e-commerce platforms, and retail brands. The continent’s youthful demographics mean these patterns will shape the next century. By any realistic measure, China’s cultural presence in Africa is already far stronger than America’s.
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7. The Audit Punchline
If Mounk’s final paragraph is wrong, then his whole essay falters. He has misvalued China’s greatest cultural assets. In the language of finance, this is not a rounding error but a false balance sheet. The result is a distorted “China Peak” thesis. As in an audit, once one finds an inventory fault on the largest line, the entire report must be reconsidered.
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Conclusion: The Trend Is China’s Friend
Chinese cultural presence is not weak, it is expanding: from platforms to products, from food chains to film festivals, from Africa’s smartphones to the viral dramas watched by teenagers in Los Angeles. What Mounk describes as weakness is in fact one of the strongest trend lines in contemporary global culture. And the trend is China’s friend in the end.
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Bibliography
Bloomberg (2025). BYD Tops Tesla in Global EV Sales for Second Year Running. Bloomberg, 12 January.
Financial Times (2025). Temu Forces Amazon and Washington to Act on de minimis Loophole. Financial Times, 5 March.
Fortune (2025). China’s Micro-Dramas Are Conquering the World. Fortune, 5 February.
Global Times (2025). Mixue Surpasses McDonald’s as World’s Largest Franchise. Global Times, 21 July.
iChongqing (2025). From China to the World: Viral Micro-Drama Drives 1 Billion Global Surge. iChongqing, 8 August.
Soax (2025). Top Social Media Platforms by Users. Soax Research, 17 June.
Wikipedia (2024). All the Crows in the World. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Crows_in_the_World